Radio director shows efficiency at work

Reporter’s Note: I shared a radio show with Beverly Prentice for five or six years in Dalton. We were both volunteeers, but when that station was dissolved, she obtained a job on the station operating out of the United Cerebral Palsy central office in Pittsfield.

She became the coordinator in 2009 of the Berkshire Talking Chronicle, a 24-hour radio station. When she arrived, the Berkshire Eagle was read in the morning (still read by the two of us on Fridays), someone reviewed Berkshire authors and the station played some music at night: that constituted the programming.

The station aired live from 9 a.m.-noon and four hours in the evening. The station had a small audience, mostly the elderly and blind, as far as Ms. Prentice could tell. The rest of the day and night programs were aired on the network station in Marshfield.

On her own, Beverly Prentice developed a thriving radio station with an astonishing variety of programs and the audience increased substantially (she believes by about 30 percent), and they also became simultaneously aware of UCP services. Together they are constructing a survey to try to find out more specifically by how much the audience has grown.

WRRS (at 104.3 in Pittsfield) is one of five affiliates governed by the Talking Information Center in Marshfield, Mass., which covers several counties in Massachusetts. Of the five affiliates governed by the Talking Information Center, only WRRS has ASCAP approval, thanks to Ms. Prentice’s initiative. That means that the station can air all the music it wants to – of any kind – as ASCAP covers all copyrighted material.

It also means that WRRS is on 24 hours a day, as the station can automatically connect to the network when not broadcasting live and thus WRRS programming continues day and night.

The programming is as varied as the people who create it, programs include: newspaper reading; two talk shows (discussion on culture and politics); Berkshire authors; history of Broadway; local human services interviews; celebrity interviews and more, all of which she developed with her team. In order to be able to present such a variety, she’s got to do a great deal of legwork: she’s in charge of volunteers (choosing, scheduling, etc.) and for that kind of programming, she had to find the volunteers to be in charge of.

The Berkshire Talking Chronicle, hustling to this end, went on Facebook (436 “friends” arrived not long after, from which came two volunteers) and Twitter. Then there are the interviews, so a great deal of outreach is required. She then develops the programs and the schedules for them.

In addition she “does the board,” or technically runs the live broadcasting of seven of those programs. Not everyone who appears on them has the know-how or wants to acquire it and she doesn’t want to discourage a good volunteer because such a person is not technically proficient.

She came by her own expertise in the Vietnam War, where she served in the army monitoring the very first computer – an enormous machine for which she had to have next to the top clearance in view of the information going through it.

Currently, she receives more invitations for various outside functions from town officials and listeners than she can possibly accept and has spoken to veterans’ and other organization four times (to date) on public community television – much of the outside participation coming to her by word of mouth.

Her boss, Deborah Sadowy, human resources manager at UCP, said Ms. Prentice is very forward-thinking; she has improved the station with varied new programming, and is generally doing “a tremendous job.”

Ms. Prentice finds the association with UCP very satisfying because they share much the same goals – to encourage handicapped people (in her case, the elderly and particularly the blind) to “live the same life and have the same opportunities as everyone else.”

And that partly explains why she’s also a Lion and has been since 2001. She’s not only a Lion, but was elected – unanimously – to be the General of C20 which consists of four counties – District 33Y – and martialed those troops from June 2011 to June 10, 2012.

Even a partial list of her duties (in addition to her professsional ones) is jaw-dropping: overseeing 1,100 members and 39 clubs; constantly trying to improve their projects; seeing to it that laws and rules are relevant and official; working on their projects with the board of directors; keeping an eye on the Eyemobile, which screens for eye problems; training new leaders – and she’d barely got started on the list of her duties when we left for the day.

Recently she became the chair of the Lion committee Alert, a committee that organizes first responders for disasters (hurricanes and the like). She emphasizes that she does none of these things alone; she takes care to treat her volunteers well so they’ll go on helping her.

But perhaps her most important accomplishment was overcoming severe agoraphobia with the help of her husband.

“I find I’m a people person – it’s fun!” she said.

Smart as she is, she locked herself out of her house not long ago. It took her a while to figure how to get back in.

She sometimes arrives for the Friday reading date very close to airtime, as she has mouths to feed at home in Cummington before she leaves for work in Pittsfield: a husband (also a Lion), rabbits, a dog, a bird and two cats (the opossum had to go).

Posted by Rae Eastman on October 4, 2012. Filed under Community News,News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry